When Bob Middo was President of the SWCFFF one of his goals was to get the clubs back involved. Greg and I have had many discussions about this same subject. How do we get the clubs to communicate more with each other? How can we get the clubs to take ownership of the SWCFFF?

We are starting with trying to open up communication between the clubs. Each club has a representative that we send information to pass along to the members; we are going to do more conservation projects from clean-ups to helping clubs with their conservation projects. Such as this month we are meeting with a group of fly clubs that have been working on a project to reestablish the Kern River Rainbow Trout. The Kern River Rainbow is one of ten fish indigenous to California. I’ll write about that next month after we have the meeting. Our conservation Director will be contacting the clubs and seeing if the whole SWCFFF membership can help on each club’s conservation in their area. We are looking at a clean up of Convict Creek, Mammoth Creek and if we can get enough interest we can work on more creeks in the Eastern Sierra area.In June we are looking at going back to Rush creek and helping with the clean up again this year. Kern River is another place of interest since more and more of us are finding out about this river. Santa Barbara does a lot of conservation projects as well as San Diego. So we are looking at covering a wide area, from Mammoth to San Diego. The more our SWCFFF members know about these projects then the jobs won’t be as big for a club. We are also meeting with Fish and Game, Caltrout, and The Forest Service to see where we can help out.

We would like to do some fundraising so that we can maybe have a conclave like the other councils do and promote fly-fishing. The idea of having a small conclave this year was talked about at the January quarterly meeting. We felt that at this time we don’t have the funds to undertake a conclave. We hope in 2009 we can have a conclave. Which of course means we will need a conclave coordinator and committee to organize this event. If you might be interested please contact either Greg Stumpf at (949) 293-5570 or Gary Applebee at (760) 365-7071. We hope that we can get all the clubs to participate in putting on a conclave.

There is also a group of certified casters teaching casting certification to some of the clubs in our council. The Santa Clarita Fly Fishers are taking advantage of this and the San Diego Fly Fishers are looking at doing the same in their area. There are about sixty certified casters that I counted on the FFF national website in the Southwest Council. If your club is interested in getting more members certified Call Greg Stumpf at (949) 293-5570 or Bob Middo at (310) 798-2009 to find out more about what they are doing with casting. Kaweah Fly Fishers has bought the rights to “The Way of a Trout” by Trout Unlimited and is looking at putting it on DVD. When this happens we will let everyone know so they can buy a copy for their Trout in the Classroom programs.

As you can see the SWCFFF is starting to get active in many things from conservation to education. The thing to remember is that this is YOUR council. Without the clubs and their involvement we don’t have a FFF council.

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